Largest drive capacity DNS-323 with Alt-F will be able to support?

[boxbox]

Is the largest capacity of drives that the DNS-323 able to support limited by the hardware itself? Or is the limitation a firmware thing, and modifications to the firmware can allow the DNS-323 to support larger drives that will come out over the next several years?

What's the largest capacity of a drive that DNS-323 (with the latest Alt-F) is able to support today? (Currently I'm using 1TB drives with no problem, and read the other thread here that 4TB drives seem to be working.)

I've read about how certain models of SATA drives don't work with DNS-323 while others do (I've seen compatibility lists on other forums, for example), and I'm curious as to why some models wouldn't be compatible. After all, aren't all SATA drives following the same standard, so they should all work? Just curious about why some might not work, while others do.

[guizm...@gmail.com]

Hello boxbox,

The hard drive limitation is a firmware thing. D-Link stock firmware only support up to 2TB hard drives. This is mostly due because D-Link stock firmware will use MBR instead of GPT as partition tables.

MBR (Master Boot Record) as a limit of 2TB per drive. GPT is supported by Alt-F, but is not the default partition table. So in order to use HDD bigger than 2TB with Alt-F on your DNS-323, you'll have to partition your HDD using the advanced option in Alt-F to use GPT instead of MBR.

Hope this answer well your question.

Phil

[João Cardoso]

On Monday, July 8, 2013 1:30:52 AM UTC+1, guizm...@gmail.com wrote:

Hello boxbox,

The hard drive limitation is a firmware thing. D-Link stock firmware only support up to 2TB hard drives. This is mostly due because D-Link stock firmware will use MBR instead of GPT as partition tables.

MBR (Master Boot Record) as a limit of 2TB per drive. GPT is supported by Alt-F, but is not the default partition table. So in order to use HDD bigger than 2TB with Alt-F on your DNS-323, you'll have to partition your HDD using the advanced option in Alt-F to use GPT instead of MBR.

hmm, I'm not sure about that... 

Both the Disk Wizard and Disk Partitioner should automatically use GPT when the disk is bigger than 2TB.

Is this not happening? I think it is, as several 3TB and 4TB disk owners have not reported any issue. But I don't have a 3TB disk.

The reason why using MBR by default with smaller than 2TB disks is for compatibility with old motherboards and OS, in case you want to use the disks on an older PC or OS.

Additionally, the Disk Partitioner has the capability to convert between MBR and GPT (and vice-versa), but of course only for simple partition schemes (less than 4 primary partitions). The conversion keeps the disk data intact.

Thanks

[guizm...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the explanation. That makes perfectly sense, since my 2TB drives were partitioned by the Wizard using MBR instead of GPT.

Thanks for clearing that out.

[boxbox]

What is the drive limit (if any) for DNS-323 and Alt-F when using GPT? Is there essentially no limit, it can work with any size drives (e.g. let's say 8+TB drives become common after a few years)?

Does switching between MBR and GPT in the Alt-F disk partitioner work when the drive is LUKS-encrypted?

[guizm...@gmail.com]

I do not know about LUKS-encrypted partition, but some encryption technologies are bond to the partition scheme. If any change of the partition table is made, the encryption mechanism may ask you for the recovery key for security purpose (this is how bitlocker works on NTFS drives on Windows).

As for the HDD size limit, GPT supports up to 9 ZB drives (zetabytes), so you're in business for a couple of years. :D

[boxbox]

So if I travel to the future and come back with a 100 TB drive DNS-323 and Alt-F will handle it no problem? :) Interesting!